Brain damage resulting from traumatic, ischemic, and/or chemical etiology is a major health concern worldwide, representing a potentially catastrophic debilitating medical emergency with poor long-term prognosis. For many organ-based diseases, rapid diagnostics for surrogate biomarkers (usually involving blood tests) are invaluable in determining how the disease should be treated. Such tests for assessing traumatic or ischemic brain injury, however, have not been optimized. The most useful diagnostics currently available therefore are computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Both of these are expensive, not rapidly accessible in an emergency room environment, and are not useful for diagnosing mild to moderate brain damage. Accordingly, a need exists for improved methods and diagnostic kits for assessing the severity of brain injury. Particularly helpful would be those that provide physicians with quantifiable neurochemical markers to help determine the seriousness of the injury, the anatomical and cellular pathology of the damage, and the implementation of appropriate medical management and treatment.